By Matt Hoisch

Over the last week, San Miguel County has drawn blood to test thousands of people for COVID-19 antibodies. This effort came together in a matter of days through a public-private partnership between the County and United Biomedical, the company providing the tests. But the testing would not have run as efficiently as it has without another piece of the puzzle: an army of volunteers from the community stepping up to do everything, from directing traffic, to handing out carefully labeled test kits, to drawing the blood. 

“I’ve been really surprised and quite honestly, daily, more people are singing up to volunteer,” says Lynn Borup, the Executive Director of Tri-County Health Network, the local nonprofit that the County tapped to organize the volunteers. “It’s been amazing to me, and I think that’s been the benefit.”

Susan Lily, Public Information Officer for the County, notes that the County initially put in a request for the National Guard to help with testing, but they were not available. So, she says, the county developed a plan to use volunteers. They reached out to Tri-County in the hopes of tapping one central group to handle volunteer outreach and coordination. 

Tri-County already works with citizens across the county on issues like food security, insurance, and energy. Borup says the nonprofit has been able to use that pre-existing trust and network of contacts to quickly enlist and mobilize volunteers. 

“Some folks are not really keen on government agencies, and so sometimes we found if local governments take the lead in things like this, people kind of back away a little bit, just depending on their own biases,” Borup notes. “Knowing that it’s Tri-County and knowing that we might have helped that person in the past, they always want to give back. And so they’re really happy to outreach to us and feel comfortable and safe that their information is really going to be used for the purposes of just volunteering.”

Trust has been especially key considering the fact that decisions on how and when volunteers will help have changed day by day. 

“I’m emailing people at seven, eight, nine o'clock at night for the next day. With stuff like that, it really shows how amazing our community is because people are responding and they’re getting there the next day at 8:30 when I emailed them not even ten hours earlier,” says Sami Damsky. Normally, she is the Behavioral Health Outreach Coordinator for Tri County Health, but for now, she is in charge of organizing and directing the more than 60 volunteers per day that do everything except draw blood. That organizing falls to Emil Sante, Chief Paramedic for the Telluride Fire Protection District and the County Coroner. Sante says he has about 50 volunteers who can take shifts to draw blood. A lot of them, he says, are nurses or EMTs who already serve medical needs daily. He’s also gotten requests from people with experience but who haven’t drawn blood in years.

“Let’s dust you off and put you with somebody who’s real experienced, and after an hour or two of being lobbed some soft balls here, we’ll take the training wheels off and you’re on your own,” says Sante. “It’ been pretty gratifying. Some of these people that have come out who haven’t done this in a while—you can see it in their face. They’re really having a good time.”

The county also has a significant immigrant population. Nuria Galipienso is one of several people who volunteered as a translator, helping Spanish-speaking community members navigate the testing. She worked in the area temporarily as a teacher years earlier, but she moved from Spain to Telluride permanently last year.

“They have gave me so many things. It’s been for me so easy to get adapted here,” she notes. “So in some way I was thinking ‘I need to give something back to the community too.’”

As COVID-19 continues to spread, there’s a good chance other communities will need to mobilize similar volunteer efforts in one way or another. Borup says some of the major lessons from San Miguel’s effort have been that it’s important to have one, central place for people to sign up, and it’s key to have a good system for figuring out availability and scheduling. 

But at the end of the day, it’s also all about being flexible and collaborative. Damsky says it’s amazing to see so many people from so many different sectors and organizations that are normally separate come together.

“This kind of is more like, yeah, we’re all just doing this.”

Tri-County Health Network is continuing to enlist volunteers to help with testing as well as other community needs, such as picking up groceries for people. Anyone interested should sign up at their website, tchnetwork.org, or email volunteer@tchnetwork.org.